you can get 5-6 pieces of tionese gear from the 99 comms in the mail, depending on what you spend it on. Heroic FP are hard, they always have been, it is just that people have outgeared most of it and learned the aggro ranges and where they can skip things now. Unfortunately there is no fast for the FTP, it isn't supposed to be fast. It is supposed to take time, so that people can learn, and learning about your class in a FP is not the way to do it.

That is what guilds and general chat is for. Though for the past ten years general chat has degraded to a bunch of nonsense, it used to be a great place to ask questions and get feedback and help (EQ/DAoC/and a few others until about the time of WoW when it really went down hill) But if you are having problems a guild should be there to help out, and if they aren't helping, it is time to find another guild.

As for people being touchy, that goes across the board for any server. The quality of players has changed over the last 17 years I have been playing MMOs, it used to be a much smaller community that was close knit and very helpful, but that was because EVERYONE needed eachother to do anything. There was no soloing quests or grinding mobs, you needed a group, and people used to play a class that has since died off. That is right there used to be FIVE classes, you had Tank, melee dps, ranged dps, healer, AND support. Support's job was there ONLY to help the group out, they couldn't do anything else effectively. The reason for these games is to group, but these days the quality of people has gone down, and a lot of times it is people just wanting to get theirs and forget anyone else.

Bottom line is that these days if someone percives a way to advance themselves before others they take it for the most part. The days of grouping and hoping that everyone will wait for you, or help you are coming to a close as most of the time people group only to get their thing done and then be gone. It is sad, but true. Most people don't have the time or patience anymore to help out or build friendships. When you do find people who are like that though it is very nice, but for most of them they wont go any further because they have been burned too many times with helping somone only to get taken advantage of.

I would love to say that a particular server is better than another for helping, but really you will find people taking advantage everywhere. RP servers have a more mature player base to be sure, which is why you have some people rolling on RP servers to take advantage of it, and you can tell who those people are.